The Black Panthers Were Not Revolutionaries
They tacitly accepted the system they claimed to wish to overthrow
THE BLACK PANTHERS WERE NOT REVOLUTIONARIES
They tacitly accepted the system they claimed to wish to overthrow
Glenn McNair
Introduction
I was introduced to Black Power and the Black Panthers in elementary school in the 1970s by my favorite cousin, Mary Ann. She was in high school and into anything involving black militancy and I was her trusty young sidekick and acolyte. She would take me with her to protests, and I was a walking advertisement for her causes: she would write in magic marker “Free Angela Davis” on the back of my denim jacket, or “Free H. Rap Brown” on my white Converse All-Stars. She had a giant Angela Davis afro, which inspired me to sheepishly ask my mom if I could begin growing my own little ‘fro. (She grudgingly said “Yes,” and I went to school with my afro pick with Black Power fist proudly stuck in my back pocket!) No group obsessed her more than the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Neither I nor anyone else had seen anything like them—such open, militant, and armed defiance of white oppression. Over the years I remained an admirer, well before I ever considered being a historian.
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in 1966 in Oakland, California, by two black college students, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. The Party began with the goal of stopping police brutality in Oakland, and with the more ambitious Marxist goal of overthrowing capitalism. From the start they considered themselves to be the vanguard of racial and Marxist revolutions. From the start, the Panthers saw themselves as revolutionaries, as is clear from this video of Fred Hampton, in which he says to a crowd, “When I leave, you’re gonna remember I said, with the last words on my lips, ‘I am a revolutionary’”:
Fred Hampton was the chairman of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party. He was assassinated by the Chicago Police Department in 1969, with the cooperation of an FBI informant. In 1969, FBI Director J. Edgar said that “the Black Panther party, without question, represents the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”
Every scholarly treatment of the Panthers describes them as revolutionaries. Even the textbook I use—the best on African American history—says that the Panthers “hoped to fashion the party into a revolutionary vanguard dedicated to overthrowing capitalist society and ending police brutality.”
Despite this unquestioned scholarly consensus, over the years I found myself asking, “Were the Black Panthers revolutionaries, reformers, or something else?” I was motivated to ask this question because it has always appeared to me that the Panthers and other black militant or revolutionary groups have rarely been subject to the kind of critical scrutiny received by other black individuals or groups, such as the non-violent activists of the Civil Rights Movement, like Martin Luther King, for example. Two recent scholars of the Panthers, Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams, capture this lack of critical scrutiny best when they write that the Panthers—
have been reconsidered before being fully considered; celebrated and condemned in memory and imagination before historical inquiry has even begun; haunted by the shadow of their failures and resurrected as a legacy for their heroic efforts before being fully appreciated for their uniqueness and their overall significance.1
In reading about the Panthers over the years I saw patterns of action that were not consistent with revolutionary action, yet no one commented on them. This historiographical blind spot exists because, according to Lazerow and Williams—
much of the history of the Black Panthers has not been written by historians but by former Panthers or other activists turned scholars. Alternatively, another group of Panther chroniclers is made up of scholars turned activists. Neither group has the kind of objectivity to engage in unbiased inquiry into the group.2
In other words, much of the history of the Black Panther Party has been written by those who have a bias toward, or interest in, seeing the Panthers presented to the world as revolutionaries.
A new phase of black historiography
Black historiography has undergone several necessary phases. We were excluded from American history altogether, so the first struggle was for inclusion. The next phase involved demonstrating that blacks, too, were Americans, and have contributed to America’s great national narrative. The third phase—the one we are currently in—has been to defend or vindicate black humanity by showing that African Americans are not a collection of stereotypes and that any differences between us and other groups have been the product of systemic white oppression.
I believe it is time we move beyond that mission to a final phase, one advocated by W.E.B. Du Bois when he wrote Black Reconstruction in America in 1935. He said that he did not write for those who viewed black people “as a distinctly inferior creation” incapable of self-governance; therefore, he would spend little time defending black humanity. The African American historian Cedric Johnson urges a similar approach to our study of blacks in the 1960s and 70s, recommending that our history should be “written as though African Americans were ordinary human beings capable of the same graft, heroism, tyranny, altruism, failures, and triumphs as all others.” He seeks to move beyond “treatments that either demonize or vindicate black radical politics.”3 It is in that spirit that I have undertaken this inquiry. It is only when we have reached this point that we can say we now see the people of the African diaspora in all their fullness as actors and agents in the drama that is human history.
What is a revolutionary?
We should begin our consideration of whether the Panthers were revolutionaries or not with a definition of the term, since few works about them do so. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a revolutionary as “one engaged in revolution,” with revolution being “a fundamental change in political organization, especially the overthrow or renunciation of one government or ruler and the substitution of another by the governed.” This is how the Panthers viewed themselves.
Following the police riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, Eldridge Cleaver (a former prison inmate turned journalist, BPP minister of information, and author of one of the most important militant texts of the 1960s, Soul on Ice) said, “We have been driven out of the political arena.... We will not dissent from the American Government. We will overthrow it.” In 1969, a CBS news interviewer quoted David Hilliard, Panther chief of staff, as saying, “We advocate the very direct overthrow of the government by way of force and violence by picking up guns and moving against it, because we recognize it as being oppressive and, in recognizing that, we know that the only solution to it is armed struggle.”
Hilliard then went on to quote the Declaration of Independence to defend his position:
When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
This quotation from the Declaration of Independence appeared at the end of the Panther Ten-Point Program, the Party’s mission statement, which was reproduced in all issues of The Black Panther, the Party’s newspaper, which concluded in 1969 that “the only way that we’re going to be free is to wipe out once and for all the oppressive structure of America.”
The Black Panthers: rhetoric vs. action
Despite their explicit statements, I would contend that the Black Panthers were not revolutionaries. This is because (1) they did not attempt to overthrow the government of the United States; (2) they relied on the government they were ostensibly committed to overthrowing to legitimate or support their activities; (3) they did not conduct themselves as revolutionaries as the term is commonly understood, by their own definition of the word, or when compared to those they sought to emulate; and (4) they rarely defended themselves against state violence, which was their entire raison d’être.
It is important to separate rhetoric from action, word from deed. The Panthers regularly used the rhetoric of revolution but rarely, if ever, engaged in revolutionary action as normally understood. Before proceeding, it is useful to make one other point. One might also consider it revolutionary just to have blacks enjoy the same rights as all other American citizens. True enough, but that was the position advocated by the nonviolent civil rights movement, from which the Panthers sought to distinguish themselves. They adamantly refused to view themselves or have the public view them as reformers because they were revolutionaries. How did this all begin?
The right to bear arms? The Black Panther’s Constitutionalism
During his time as a student at Merritt College and San Francisco State College, Huey Newton learned through his study of California law that people could carry firearms in public if they were not concealed, and that citizens had the right to observe police officers carrying out their duties. These two provisions of California law became the core of the Panthers self-defense program. Newton, Seale, and a small group of Panthers began patrolling black neighborhoods and getting out of their cars—armed—and observing the police when they performed stop-and-frisks of blacks.
In 1967, Oakland police pulled over Newton, Seale, and Bobby Hutton for a traffic violation. During this confrontation Newton brandished a loaded shotgun, provoking a standoff with the armed police officers. He refused to back down, yelling at the officers—
Ain’t you ever heard of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States? Don’t you know you don’t remove nobody’s property without due process of law? What’s the matter with you? You’re supposed to be people enforcing the law, and here you are, ready to violate my constitutional rights. You can’t see my gun. You can’t have my gun. The only way you’re going to get it from me is to try to take it.
The officers backed down and drove away. The Black Panther legend was born.
No one before had seen a black person with arms and the law on their side confront the police and live to tell the tale unscathed. One young black woman who saw one of these confrontations was Afeni Shakur, mother of Tupac Shakur. She recalled being impressed by a Panther’s response when a police officer attempted to take his gun in 1967: “Am I under arrest?” When the officer said “No,” the Panther defiantly replied, “Then take your hands off my motherfucking gun. I have a constitutional right to have this gun.” Shakur joined the Black Panther Party right after this encounter. These acts of confrontation made the Panthers heroes to many blacks and an existential threat to many whites and the FBI and cemented the idea that they were revolutionaries in the public imagination.
But there was a decidedly unrevolutionary aspect to the armed patrols and acts of defiance—and indeed to the Panther’s use of firearms in general. It was based, as they said themselves, on the exercise of their constitutional rights: the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits the government from taking property without due process of law and provides for the equal protection of the laws, and the Second Amendment, which protects the right to keep and bear arms. In other words, they were doing what they were doing because the government guaranteed their right to do it, a government they were supposed to be committed to overthrowing.
The Panthers relied on the Constitution not just for the armed dimension of their activism but for their right to speak and protest, and to have those rights be protected in the courts. In a 1969 interview, David Hilliard said that what the Panthers were working for “is already spelled out within the Constitution of the United States.” He also noted that “within the Constitution is our right to free speech.” He went on to say that members of the Black Panther Party believed that they could not—
receive a fair and impartial trial without certain preconditions conforming to our alleged constitutional rights. So we state the following: we feel that the court should follow their own federal Constitution, and when they have failed to do so, and continue to ignore their mistakes, but persist dogmatically to add insult to injury, those courts are in contempt of the people.
In an editorial on Bobby Seale’s treatment during his trial as a member of the Chicago 8, Panther John Coleman wrote: “Chairman Bobby asks for only what he is entitled to under the Constitution, that being: the right to cross-examine witnesses, the right to represent himself or have a lawyer of his own choice.”
Rank and file Panthers also believed the Constitution was essential for their struggle. In a 1967 issue of the Black Panther, the author of a piece on a Party rally opined—
the nice thing about these Brothers is that they had their arms to defend themselves and their Black Brothers and Sisters while they exercised their Constitutional Rights: Freedom of Speech, and the right to Peacefully Assemble. And while they exercised another Constitutional right: the right to bear arms to defend themselves.
Thus, to carry out their efforts to bring about revolution in America the Black Panthers relied on all the following constitutional rights:
First Amendment: Right to Freedom of Speech, Press, Religion, and Assembly for Redress of Grievances
Second Amendment: Right to Keep and Bear Arms
Fourth Amendment: Right to be Secure in Homes and Property, Free from Unreasonable Searches and Searches
Fifth Amendment: Right Not to be Deprived of Life, Liberty, or Property without Due Process of Law and the Right Against Self-Incrimination
Sixth Amendment: Right to a Speedy Trial by a Jury of One’s Peers, and to Confront Witnesses
Fourteenth Amendment: Right to the Equal Protection of the Laws
And let us not forget, David Hilliard and all Panthers based their right to revolution on America’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence.
According to the legal historian Bridgette Baldwin, the Panthers viewed the “U.S. Constitution as a weapon equal to the gun,” and believed it central to accomplishing their goals. In her view, “the militant actions and revolutionary demands of the Black Panther Party were legitimate, reasonable, and within the bounds of the U.S. Constitution.”4 Baldwin is making the case that blacks enjoying their full constitutional rights was revolutionary, but she goes on to say their demands were reasonable and within the framework of the existing government. Is demanding that you be treated equally within the existing political economy revolutionary? If it was radical for blacks to enjoy their constitutional rights then that made Martin Luther King, Jr. and the non-violent civil rights movement revolutionary, too. However, as I note above, the Panthers went to great lengths to disassociate themselves from King and his fellow activists.
Audre Lorde famously wrote—
The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.
Yet that is precisely what the Black Panthers were apparently attempting to do. But what happens if the master decides to change the rules regarding the use of his tools?
California’s Mulford Act (1967)
To keep the Black Panthers from carrying firearms, the California state legislature planned to pass the Mulford Act, which would prohibit the carrying of loaded firearms in public. The Panthers decided to protest this legislation by going to the state capitol in Sacramento on May 2, 1967—armed.
The Panthers reached the assembly floor, where they were surrounded by state police, who disarmed them. Bobby Seale demanded their guns back but the police refused and instead shoved the Panthers into an elevator while Seale yelled, “Is this the way the racist government works, won’t let a man exercise his constitutional rights?” Once again, the Panthers were appealing to the laws of the government they were attempting to overthrow to carry out their revolution. Once the Panthers were safely downstairs and away from the legislators the police concluded they had not broken the law and returned their guns.
After the Panthers left the capitol, the police, armed with riot shotguns, pulled over their car and arrested them for allegedly carrying concealed weapons and other minor charges. The Mulford Act became law, and what did the Panthers do? They discontinued their armed patrols because they no longer had the legal right to do so, and because the legal costs of the Sacramento arrest were too high, as would be costs from future arrests. The Panthers had voluntarily abandoned the tactic that captured the nation’s attention, and the principal means of drawing members to their ranks. Would true revolutionaries jettison their most effective tactic because it violated the laws of the regime they are attempting to overthrow?
Despite terminating armed police patrols, the Panthers nevertheless continued to emphasize the importance of guns in advancing the Marxist world revolution and bringing about social justice. In a 1967 essay entitled, “In Defense of Self-Defense,” Huey Newton wrote:
When the people move for liberation they must have the basic tool of liberation: the gun. Only with the power of the gun can the Black masses halt the terror and brutality directed against them by the armed racist power structure; and in one sense only by the power of the gun can the whole world be transformed into the earthly paradise dreamed up by the people from time immemorial.
Newton was advancing the thesis that revolution would be accomplished through entirely defensive means, a dubious proposition of which there is no historical example. In a similar vein, the Panther leadership was quick to point out that they never used their guns “to go into the white community to shoot up white people” or “claimed the right to indiscriminate violence.” In other words, the Panthers would not use their guns to engage in terrorist acts against white people, their oppressors. Strange behavior for revolutionaries.
This distinction between offensive and defensive violence is one that, as we shall see, would break the Party. Of course, there need not be a contradiction between defensive and offensive use of arms, and most revolutionaries would not see one: the people have a right to defend themselves against violence while engaging in offensive violence to advance their revolutionary agenda. But did the Panthers consistently use firearms to defend themselves?
Rare acts of armed self-defense
During the predawn hours of January 16, 1968, officers from the San Francisco Police Department kicked down the front door of Eldridge Cleaver’s residence without a search or arrest warrant. The next month, on February 25, 1968, armed officers of the Berkeley Police Department forced their way into the apartment of Bobby Seale. In response, in the March 16, 1968, issue of the Black Panther, Huey Newton issued Executive Mandate No. 3, in which he declared that that the police—
had no authority to enter—what they did have was the power of the gun…. Therefore, those who approach our doors in the manner of outlaws, who seek to enter our homes illegally, unlawfully and in a rowdy fashion, those who kick our doors down with no authority and seek to ransack our homes in violation of our HUMAN RIGHTS will henceforth be treated as outlaws, as gangsters, as evildoers . . . . We draw the line at the threshold of our doors. It is therefore mandated as a general order to all members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense that all members must acquire the technical equipment [guns] to defend their homes and their dependents and shall do so. Any member of the Party having such technical equipment who fails to defend his threshold shall be expelled from the Party for Life.
Here Newton issued an explicit order to Panthers to arm themselves and to use guns to defend themselves against what they determined to be unlawful police raids—yet they rarely did. Over the next few years police raided Panther homes and offices dozens of times, which resulted in Panther property being destroyed and Panthers being injured or killed. They did not defend themselves and, in many instances, they did not even have arms to defend themselves. No one was ever disciplined or expelled from the Party, as Executive Mandate No. 3 required.
There were a few noteworthy exceptions. On April 6, 1968, a little after 9:00 p.m., Eldridge Cleaver and three cars of Black Panthers, including Bobby Hutton, were pulled over by police. This encounter resulted in a shootout in which Cleaver was shot in the foot and buttocks and Hutton was killed. In a press conference the following day, Bobby Seale described the traffic stop as an “ambush” and explained that the Panthers only carried firearms in self-defense. In August 1968, five people were shot at the Watts Music Festival, and later in the day the police pulled over a car with four Panthers. The Panthers were armed and prepared to defend themselves and a shootout ensued. Police killed three of the Panthers, two of the police officers were wounded, and one of the Panthers escaped.
In the few other episodes where Panthers use firearms to defend themselves, it was under similar circumstances: police approached Panthers on the street or during traffic stops and gunfire was exchanged. In other words, rather than these being the standard responses of a revolutionary organization, they were the spontaneous acts of individual Panthers, the kinds of shootouts that happen between police officers and civilians every year, right now.
The most famous of these spontaneous acts of armed self-defense involved Huey Newton himself. In October 1967, he and another Panther were pulled over by the Oakland police. Exactly what happened next is not known, but a struggle took place between Newton and officer John Frey. When the incident ended Frey, Newton, and a second officer had all been shot by what were later determined to be the officers’ guns and Frey lay dead. Newton carjacked a car (or maybe not because the witness later refused to testify) and drove himself to the hospital, where he was handcuffed to a bed.
Newton was subsequently convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to imprisonment for a term of two to fifteen years. His conviction was overturned in 1970 after a worldwide campaign to secure his release akin to those that took place after the police murder of George Floyd. The judge had failed to instruct the jury that they could have convicted Newton of involuntary manslaughter. In essence, the criminal justice system had been put on trial.
There were, however, two high profile incidents where the Panthers acted as Executive Mandate No. 3 dictated. On July 31, 1969, police raided the Chicago Panther office for the second time in a little over a month. Twenty-four police cars were used to shut down the street. Unlike during the previous raid, this time the Panthers were prepared to defend themselves. Three Panthers used handguns to keep the police at bay for thirty-five minutes, until they ran out of ammunition. Police eventually shot their way into the building and beat the three Panthers with their rifle butts.
On December 8, 1969, police conducted a raid on the Panthers’ Los Angeles chapter headquarters. Seventy-five police officers descended on the fortified building, including the first SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) team in America. A gun battle erupted between officers and the Panthers; police fired over five thousand rounds into the building. The Panthers returned fire with rifles, machine guns, and hurled Molotov cocktails. In response, the police attempted to break through the roof of the building by dropping dynamite from a helicopter onto the roof. The battle went on for hours until the Panthers waved a white flag and surrendered.
The Party fractures over urban guerilla tactics
In sum then, the Panthers never managed to initiate offensive action against the government and rarely defended themselves against police violence—even when it was the official policy of their organization to do so. Except in isolated, spontaneous episodes, they were unwilling to break the law to advance their revolutionary agenda, as when armed police patrols became illegal after passage of the Mulford Act. No successful revolutionary organization has conducted itself in this fashion. This failure to engage in revolutionary violence led to the fracturing of the Black Panther Party. Matters came to a head over the use of urban guerrilla tactics.
In 1967, Huey Newton said—
when the people learn that it is no longer advantageous for them to resist by going into the streets in large numbers, and when they see the advantage in the activities of the guerrilla warfare method, they will quickly follow this example. But first, they must respect the party which is transmitting this message.... When the masses hear that a Gestapo policeman has been executed while sipping coffee at a counter, and the revolutionary executioners fled without being traced, the masses will see the validity of this kind of resistance.
In 1970, Newton wrote—
Our program is armed struggle. We have hooked up with the people who are rising up all over the world with arms because we feel that only with the power of the gun will the bourgeoisie be destroyed and the world transformed.
When asked about the Panthers’ most important inspirations, Newton said—
not only Fidel but Che, Ho Chi Minh and Mao and Kim II Sung, all the guerrilla bands that have been operating in Mozambique and Angola, and the Palestinian guerrillas who are fighting for the socialist world.... The guerrillas who are operating in South Africa and numerous other countries will have had a great influence on us. We study and follow their example. We are also very interested in the strategy that’s being used in Brazil, which is an urban area, and we plan to draw on that.
Here Newton was referring to the revolutionary guerilla group in Brazil that was the attempting to overthrow the military dictatorship that had been in control of the country since 1964. The group’s leader was Carlos Marighella, a former engineering student turned Communist Party politician and then Marxist revolutionary.
Marighella and his group were responsible for a series of high-profile bank robberies and kidnappings, including that of the U.S. ambassador to Brazil. He was assassinated by Brazilian police in an ambush in 1969. While he was the key leader of the rebellion in Brazil, his greatest contribution to global revolution was his authorship of The Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerilla, which became the bible for guerilla strategy and tactics around the world.
In the Mini-Manual, Marighella asserted—
a Brazilian...is a political revolutionary and an ardent patriot, he is a fighter for his country’s liberation. The urban guerilla is not afraid of dismantling and destroying the present Brazilian economic, political, and social system, for his aim is to help the rural guerilla and to collaborate in the creation of a totally new and revolutionary social and political structure, with the armed people in power.
Their principal aims were “the physical liquidation of the chiefs and assistants of the armed forces and the police; and the expropriation of government resources and those of the big capitalists, latifundists, and imperialists” to “sustain the revolution itself.” These goals would be accomplished through violent actions “including deaths, explosions, seizures of arms, ammunition, and explosives, assaults on banks and prisons, etc....sufficient enough to leave no room for doubt as to the actual aims of the revolutionaries.” Marighella believed—
Today to be an assailant or a terrorist is a quality that ennobles any honorable man because it an act worthy of a revolutionary engaged in armed struggle against the shameful military dictatorship and its monstrosities.
Newton did not refer to Marighella by name, but other Panthers did. While Newton and the Oakland Panthers were refusing to engage in guerrilla activity, former Panther minister of information Eldridge Cleaver and Field Marshal Donald Cox (both of whom were exiled in Algeria) regularly urged blacks to engage in guerrilla activity. In a January 1971 issue of the Black Panther, Cox wrote—
When a guerrilla unit moves against this oppressive system by executing a pig or by attacking its institutions, by any means—sniping, stabbing, bombing, etc.—in defense against the 400 years of racist brutality, murder, and exploitation, this can only be defined correctly as self-defense.
He then went on to quote Carlos Marighella about the honor conferred on assailants and terrorists quoted above. The Panther 21 (discussed below) wrote in an open statement to the Weather Underground, “Are you hip to Marighella—Carlos Marighella: ‘Revolutionary action unleashed by small groups of armed men was the great strength that nourished our struggle.’”
Despite expressing their admiration for Marighella and his methods and choosing as their heroes and role models revolutionaries who employed similar tactics, like Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Kim Il Sung, the Panthers never, ever, employed such tactics themselves because, in the end, Newton and his supporters did not believe black people were ready to support armed revolution or that such a revolution would be successful. In writing of Eldridge Cleaver’s defection from the Party Newton wrote—
The Black Panther Party has reached a contradiction with Eldridge Cleaver and he has defected from the Party, because we would not order everyone into the streets tomorrow to make a revolution. We recognize that this is impossible...because the people are not at that point now.... We can continue to push our basic survival program. We can continue to serve the people as advocates of their true interests. We can truly become a political revolutionary vehicle which will lead the people to a higher level of consciousness, so that they will know what they must really do in their quest for freedom.
Panther Chief of Staff David Hilliard echoed Newton:
I speak to Eldridge every day and I’m mindful of the cadre who want to pick up the gun. But the concept of the Party as a liberation Army overthrowing the American government is not realistic. When we begin our attack who’s going to join us? Party comrades will jump off the moon if Huey tells them to. Our allies won’t.
Ultimately, Newton and Party leaders did not support armed revolution because Black people were not ready to do so and would not support them, and their allies—a great many of them white—would not do so either, making the overthrow of the American government impossible.
This decision not to engage in offensive revolutionary violence split the Party and moved them down the road of reformist strategies and tactics, their so-called “community survival programs” (including Free Breakfast for School Children, medical services, and education) and electoral politics. How did this happen? The split occurred because some Panthers favored the guerilla approach to revolution and the Party’s leadership did not. In addition to Cleaver, the most important Panthers to challenge Newton on guerilla tactics were the New York Panther 21.
The Panther 21
The Panther 21 was a group of New York-based Panthers fed up with the Central Committee’s unwillingness to engage in revolutionary action. They were arrested and charged with planning to bomb and engage in coordinated sniper attacks against two police stations and an education office in 1969. They were acquitted in 1971 of all 156 charges after it was revealed that the police had infiltrated the group and played key roles in organizing the plot. Despite not having been guilty of the crimes accused, the acts were those that the Panther 21 had sought to engage in. They said as much in calling out the Panther leadership in Oakland.
On January 19, 1971, the Panther 21 published a statement in the East Village Other denouncing the Party for failing to engage in armed revolution, citing the Weather Underground (the paramilitary wing of Students for a Democratic Society) as a group they should emulate. They wrote—
The only thing that will deal with reactionary force and violence is revolutionary counter-force and counter-violence. [...] It is your duty as revolutionaries to “change and shape the cultural revolution” into a real revolutionary culture—to shape your youth to fight. For instance, take a group, a party and its supporters with a few activists—it can move in a revolutionary manner against the pigs OR it can function—have a newspaper, hold rallies, conventions, congresses, etc.—then rhetoricians rhetoric, functionaries function, printing presses print, delegates travel, international friendships grow, “leaders” become overwhelmed with “work”—then the prospects of armed struggle—real revolution diminish. It gets lost in the “works”—it becomes to be looked upon as adventurism—always premature—it might “sabotage” the legality of the party—(which if it was effective would be illegal anyway)—it might bring down too much repression—meanwhile, the fascists snatch out the activists—who are not so noisy—but deemed more dangerous. Does this not sound familiar? [Here they are clearly referring to the Central Committee] […] Che [Guevara] Stated—“Armed struggle is the only solution for people who fight to free themselves”—and we have lost dearly loved comrades. Also—probably every experienced revolutionary has—but we realize that risks must be taken—some will die—others will replace them (or us)—like people rapping about ending racism, colonialism, sexism and all of the other pig “isms”, exploitation and all that—but these things can only be ended by revolution—and revolution is—in the final analysis—ARMED STRUGGLE—revolution is VIOLENCE—revolution is WAR—revolution is BLOODSHED! How long have different successful liberation fronts fought before they have won large popular support? […] Now no successful war for liberation has ever been waged without violence—the question is how intelligently are we going to use it? We must fight with gun, bomb, mind, and heart—we must match the enemy AT LEAST blow for blow—AT LEAST!
The Panther 21 statement led to open warfare between them and the Panthers—both rhetorical and literal. Huey Newton expelled most of the New York leadership from the Party. The Central Committee was concerned that the guerrilla tactics of the New York group, as well as their failure to show up for court appearances related to their trials, would send the wrong signals to Panther allies, especially donors. According to the historians Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin (who have written the most authoritative history of the Black Panther Party), “The Central Committee still was willing to advocate revolution, but it would also try to further its cause in court—not in immediate armed struggle. And it wanted allies, supporters, and donors to know that.”5
In response, in a conversation aired live on radio, Eldridge Cleaver (who was still in exile in Algeria) demanded that Huey Newton expel David Hilliard, the Party chief of staff, from the Party and reinstate the New York 21. Newton refused to continue the conversation and instead called Cleaver by phone—which Cleaver secretly recorded—and promptly expelled Cleaver and the entire international section from the Party and promised to cut them off from their international allies and contacts. Meanwhile, violence broke out between the two groups on the streets of New York, with two shootouts occurring between the Newton and Cleaver factions that resulted in the deaths of two Panthers.
The violence associated with the split over revolutionary violence put Huey Newton and the Central Committee in an untenable position. According to Bloom and Martin, the media coverage of this violence meant that the Panthers “could not simultaneously maintain broad support and insurrectionary rhetoric. The Central Committee could not denounce Cleaver [and] the New York 21...—some of the most important former members of the Party—deny any role in the killing of [Robert] Webb [one of the Cleaver supporters killed]; credibly appeal to black, antiwar, and international allies for support against state repression; and at the same time glorify armed resistance against the state.”6 The Panthers could not be revolutionaries and a political party and movement with popular support at the same time.
The national leadership made its choice, and that was to step away from the rhetoric of armed revolution. This change was reflected in the Black Panther in 1971. The paper began to emphasize the Party’s survival programs and to change the imagery that appeared in its pages. In the first twelve issues of 1971 images of weapons appear 225 times, an average of more than eighteen times per issue. Those issues published after March 27, however, displayed only five images of weapons. The editorial stance of the paper also changed. From 1967 to 1969 forty-five percent of the political editorials advocated immediate revolution; this number climbed to 65 percent by 1970. In 1971, the calls for revolution fell to 16 percent and, in 1972–73 this number declined to 1 percent.7
The Black Liberation Army and revolutionary violence
The solution for members of the Black Panther Party and those from other militant Black organizations who wanted to engage in revolutionary violence was to join the Black Liberation Army, what BLA member Jalil Muntaqim described as a “politico-military organization, whose primary objective is to fight for the independence and self-determination of Afrikan people in the United States.” Sundiata Acoli, another BLA member, said that its purpose was to “defend Black people, and to organize Black people militarily, so they can defend themselves through a people’s army and people’s war.”8
The BLA practiced the revolutionary action it preached. In 1971, the group ambushed and killed two police officers and attacked another group of officers with a hand grenade in New York City. They fired on a police car with a machine gun and killed a police sergeant in an attack on a San Francisco police station. In the same year, in Atlanta, they robbed a bank, shot and killed a police officer and broke three BLA members out of prison. In a nine-month span the Black Liberation Army assaulted ten police officers (killing seven) in New York, San Francisco, North Carolina, and Atlanta. After shooting and killing the two NYPD officers in 1971, the BLA sent a type-written message to the New York Times which read, in part: “the domestic Armed Forces of raciscm [sic] and oppression will be confronted with the guns of the Black Liberation Army, who will mete out in the tradition of Malcolm and all true revolutionaries real justice. We are revolutionary justice. All power to the people.”
The BLA’s most influential member was Sekou Odinga, a man Bryan Burrough (author of a fine book on radicals in America in the 60s and 70s) describes as “the most admired Revolutionary of his age, a savvy urban guerrilla who traveled the globe, robbed banks, and engineered prison breakouts during an underground career spanning 12 years.”9 He was captured in 1981 and charged with six counts of attempted murder, the escape of a high-profile prisoner (whom I will discuss below) and the robbery of a Brinks armored truck. He was convicted in 1984 and received consecutive twenty-five-years-to-life state sentences and a forty-year federal sentence. He was released from prison in November 2014.
The most wanted woman in U.S. history, and its most famous (or infamous) black woman revolutionary besides Angela Davis, was Joanne Chesimard—more popularly known as Assata Shakur, field marshal of the Black Liberation Army. She was arrested in 1973 for the murder of a New Jersey state trooper that occurred during an attempt to arrest her (Shakur herself was shot in the incident). After a mistrial in 1973, she was put on trial a second time in 1977 and convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. In 1979, Sekou Odinga and a group of supporters broke her out of prison, and she fled to Cuba, where she lived until her death on September 25, 2025, at age seventy-eight. At the time of her death, Assata Shakur was still on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist List, with a $1 million reward for her capture.
Bryan Burrough considers the BLA to have been—
a credible group of violent urban guerrillas, the first and only black underground of its kind in US history…. It was the logical culmination of the Black Power movement: After years of black ‘revolutionaries’ calling for armed attacks against the police and federal government, one group, the BLA, finally followed through.
Burrough has noted that only a few academic papers and police procedurals have been written about the Black Liberation Army. He attributes this lack of scholarly interest to—
the deep confusion and ambivalence the BLA engendered in its heyday. Many policemen, along with BLA members themselves, considered the group a murderous black counterpart to the Weathermen. Mainstream politicians, afraid of alienating black voters, played down this talk entirely. Following suit, most of the white-dominated press dismissed the BLA as a ragtag collection of street thugs. To the press, at least, poorly educated, self-proclaimed black guerrillas who murdered policemen were not credible revolutionaries. But self-proclaimed white guerrillas from good schools who bombed vacant buildings [referring to the Weathermen] were.10
The kind of guerrilla warfare engaged in by the BLA also never attracted significant public approbation. According to Bloom and Martin—
unlike the practices of the Black Panther Party of the late 1960s, guerrilla warfare in the United States never attracted broad allied support. Most moderate Blacks and antiwar activists viewed such activity as criminal. Guerillas were highly isolated, and they could not easily avoid capture and sometimes fatal encounters with police; when arrested, they received little legal or political support from allies in court. They had difficulty obtaining financial support for their activities, let alone for their basic survival. They had little means of communicating their perspective to a broad public other than through acts of violence.11
Most of us have never heard of Sekou Odinga and the Black Liberation Army, yet probably all of us have heard of the Black Panther Party and know them as revolutionaries. But why? While speaking and writing as Marxist revolutionaries committed to overthrowing the government of the United States and liberating the country’s African American population, the Black Panthers did not engage in actions—particularly armed violence—that would bring about this revolutionary result, even when those whom they admired did so. For example, Nelson Mandela formed Umkhonto we Sizwe, the paramilitary wing of the African National Congress, to engage first in industrial sabotage and, if that failed, to employ the kinds of guerilla tactics Carlos Marighella advocated because all forms of non-violent redress of grievances had failed to end Apartheid in South Africa. In 1964, Mandela was tried and convicted for treason for his actions and was sentenced to life imprisonment. He served twenty-seven years on Robben Island before being released in 1990.
The reasons the Panthers did not engage in such activities are straightforward: armed revolution would have been suicidal and would not have gained the support of the public in general and blacks in particular, as we have seen with the Black Liberation Army. These were the reasons those who advocated non-violent direct action did so, and why movements based on such tactics were successful not only here but around the world. The Panthers followed the course of these activists by engaging in community development and self-help in the form of their survival programs and by seeking elective office. However, none of these initiatives were revolutionary. Moreover, none proved to be as successful and long-lasting as those of the non-violent reformers.
Conclusion: revolutionary rhetoric, reformist action
So why do both the general and scholarly publics think of the Black Panthers as revolutionaries rather than reformers? I believe it is because by insisting on their constitutional rights and not engaging in armed violence—including self-defense—the BPP enjoyed the moral authority of the non-violent activists of the Civil Rights Movement while projecting the kind of militancy sought by a younger generation who wanted more done to change their circumstances and to have it done faster, and for blacks to stop turning the other cheek. The Panthers were a sui generis organization that defies precise definition. They brought the two great conflicting currents of the era together, non-violent direct action and militant Black Power, and as a result were able to win the support of a wide swath of the American Left.
Perhaps that synthesis was a revolutionary act in and of it itself? Can anyone imagine the America of the 1960s and 1970s celebrating a black organization that bombed occupied buildings, robbed banks, kidnapped and killed public officials, and sabotaged infrastructure, intent on overthrowing the government itself, like the BLA? No, what was required was a group that could be viewed as brave martyrs fighting against a racist and classist system while harming only a few of their own people (who were indeed willing to die for their cause) and who were the personification and expression of militant black manhood too long denied and who expressed the righteous anger of blacks—all without seriously threatening the existing order, which few Americans thought needed to be done away with altogether. Even today, we need black revolutionaries who conform to our national story of slow but inexorable racial progress. And that is why we continue to celebrate the Black Panthers as revolutionaries in American history and memory.
Glenn McNair is a professor of history and director of African Diaspora Studies at Kenyon College. He is also the author of Criminal Injustice: Slaves and Free Blacks in Georgia’s Criminal Justice System and is also the Dr. William T. Moore Distinguished Editor of the Georgia Historical Quarterly. Prior to entering academia, he served as a police officer in Savannah, Georgia, and a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.
Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams, eds., In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement (Duke University Press, 2006), 2.
Lazerow and Williams, In Search of the Black Panther Party, 4.
Cedric Johnson, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xxxvii.
Bridgette Baldwin, “In the Shadow of the Gun: The Black Panther Party, the Ninth Amendment, and Discourses of Self-Defense,” in Lazerow and Williams, In Search of the Black Panther Party, 78.
Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (University of California Press, 2013), 362.
Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire, 367.
Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire, 368–69.
Cited in Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire, 387.
Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (Penguin Publishing, 2016), 179.
Burrough, Days of Rage, 178, 177.
Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire, 388–89.
Thank you, Dr. McNair, this is a fascinating piece of history I knew nothing about. I learned something today.
See also David Horowitz in "Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey" (1996) for an especially illuminating and intensely personal history of the early Panthers. Many more than one erstwhile sixties radical were transformed from revolutionary to reactionary due to the Panthers' nonsensical black liberation "ideology."